Thig came to conquer Earth. As a warrior of the Orthan Horde, he had been trained since birth to see humanity as nothing more than resources to be catalogued and consumed. The Horde's cold calculus had never failed. But Thig was not prepared for the small, unbearable things: a child's laughter, the weight of a human hand in his, the way strangers looked at each other with something the Orthans had no word for. Each encounter plants a seed of doubt in the warrior who was sent to judge a world worthy only of submission. As his report to the Horde deadline approaches, Thig must choose between his loyalty to everything he was raised to believe and the dangerous possibility that the humans he was sent to destroy might be worth saving. A mid-century gem that asks whether empathy is weakness or the one thing that makes conquest impossible.
